About Me

I truly believe I am the luckiest girl in the world. At 23 years old, I've had more life-changing experiences than most do in an entire lifetime. From sailing around the world to dancing down Main Street USA, I have to wonder how this is all real.

What's Next?

For the first time in a while, I'm not really sure where my life is headed. I'll be heading to Florida after graduation to continue working for Disney, but in terms of major plans, all I know is that I want to make a difference. I'm not sure where, and I'm not sure how, but unknowing adventure is an idea I've definitely become more comfortable with over the years.

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Wednesday, April 18, 2012

On day 2 in Vietnam the first thing I did was go with Dain and Becca to
the War Remembrance Museum. This is a museum dedicated to the Vietnam
War. We only had a couple of hours because we were all on a trip
starting at 1, but we tried to make the best of it. The museum was
actually incredibly fascinating. Understandably, it was an ode to "I
hate America" but it was so, so different to see the conflict from the
opposite side. Knowing a lot of the facts, I could tell some of it was
quite exaggerated, but I also understood that the version of history I
have been taught is the American-sided one. This being the Vietnam-sided
story, it was really cool to see the comparisons and start to try to
figure out what is truth and what is fact, looking beyond the lens of
America I've been taught about for so many years. Initially, our plan
was to visit the museum and the re-unification palace before our trip,
but it turns out we didn't even have time to see the museum in its
entirety, so we just went back to the ship for our trip instead. Our
trip was to a Vietnam School for the Deaf. We would be visiting the
school briefly and then taking the kids to the zoo.
At the school, one little girl seemed immediately drawn to me and grabbed my hand and took me over to her spot. We sat down and started to color. It took a few minutes, but we got into the swing of things and started drawing a story about, what else, a princess and a castle. This girl, Tho, was so adorable and she kept running around to show all of our pictures to her friends. Everytime another kid tried to come color with us, she basically shut them out to keep coloring with me. Awwww.
After about half an hour we were taken downstairs and shown a few things that the kids made the school tries to sell to raise money. The school would like to operate without charging its students, but it does currently charge a small (less than full tuition at a private school in Vietnam) fee to enroll. Immediately, Dain and I spotted wooden Mickey carvings, and that's pretty much all the motivation we needed. Two wooden Mickey's heavier, we headed for the zoo. When we got there, we sat down and ate a meal that the ship had packed for all of us and the kids (and by we ate a meal I mean everyone else ate a meal and I drank a caprisun). We then had only 40 minutes to walk around the zoo before we had to leave, but it turned out to be long enough. The zoo was nothing special and was really run down and dirty, but obviously this trip wasn't about the zoo and it was nice to be able to just take a child's hand a walk around a zoo without constant SAS-supervision.
After the zoo it ended up taking us an hour and a half to get back because of all of the traffic, but eventually we made it and we sat down for dinner on the ship quickly and then headed out with Lexi and Jacob. We had two goals for that night: Dain's suit and Lexi's tattoo. Dain ended up really regretting not ordering a suit the day before, and we read on the white board in Tymitz Square about a place with really good prices so we decided to check it out. It was a bit of a walk from the ship, but after about an hour we found the suit place. The place was definitely less-impressive than the place the rest of us had ordered stuff from, but not too unimpressive that we would turn around. Dain ended up getting 2 suits for only $195 which was pretty much what the boys and Phan whatevertherestofthenameiscalled paid for one. I wouldn't have felt comfortable at Dain's place, but he didn't care too much. After what seemed like forever deciding colors and fabrics, he picked out two fabrics and got fitted. Then we went on a hunt for Lexi's tattoo. She had wanted to get it done in Singapore, but ran out of time, so she had looked up some legit places in Vietnam and we were trying to find them. The one place we had intended on, Saigon Ink, was closed, but we ended up getting lost in the backpacking district and found another place. I know absolutely nothing about tattoos, but Lexi seemed confident in this place after asking her series of questions. So the rest of us sat and watched while she got it done.I don't have any tattoos, and I never intend on doing so, and I'm assuming this was the only experience I'll ever have in watching someone else get one, so I tried to keep watching despite my cringing. Thankfully, there was no blood because I probably would have puked, and it was actually a lot quicker than I thought. Still, I have no desire to ever get one of my own.
After getting her tattoo, we all went to this rooftop bar that we found in the district. To get up there, we literally had walk up 7 flights of narrow and kind-of sketchy stairs, but it was pretty cool once we made it up. It was rather empty, but we prefer that rather than going to the same place as all of the other SAS kids would be at.
When we decided to go back to ship, we started to have a bit of a problem since English is pretty much nonexistant and even when we showed cab drivers our green sheet with the name of the dock they seemed to have no idea what we were talking about. But, lucky for us, after about half an hour walking in who knows what direction, we ran into some Americans who just happened to speak Vietnamese! Thankfully, these people helped us get a cab and give them the right directions and we made it back safe and sound. Another good thing about this is that the cab driver wasn't familiar with SAS and therefore wasn't charging us an outrageous price like the drivers at the dock were.
Day 2 in Vietnam was pretty full, but not full enough. I wanted more pho.